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I thought this was generally understood at the time of the changes, but it may have gotten lost for some people who have since tried necromancers. (On the other hand, maybe it hasn't, but I'll just say it anyway...)
The power of your animated dead is dependent on both the stats of the caster AND the level of the corpse.
This was really obvious back when only GM-level corpses could be wraiths and you had to be GM in order to create them. Wraiths were clearly the best and therefore the only animates that any GM carried around were wraiths.
One of the goals of the animate changes was to give people a choice of what animates to use so that the spell is an entire toolbox instead of just a sledgehammer. But one thing that did not change is that corpse level is very important. In particular, the skill mastery of the animates are dependent on corpse-level. If you are having problems with animates not using weapons correctly, you are either giving them weapons they are not skilled at as a class, or more likely, you are using too low level of a corpse.
If you are a GM and you aren't using GM-level corpses (even to create skeletons), then you are doing yourself just as much of a disservice as someone who used non-wraiths before the changes. But in retrospect, it's much harder to see when someone is doing it wrong (and laugh at them) now, so I think the point may have been lost.
I'm not claiming that there shouldn't be some additional balancing for animate. But I continue to agree with the notion that animates were too much of a crutch in the past for the class and that it should not go back to them being used to dominate the game.
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